4 Folk, Walking the Dogs

Page 173 Line 4

If you haven’t participated in this fun little prompt before, it’s quite simple. Grab a book…any kind of book…and flip to page 173, then count to line 4. Use that line as a prompt for a post. You can take the quote directly as use that in a story, or simply find inspiration in the line and come up with something else.

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This quote is from A readers Digest book called “The Ever Changing Woodlands, the Living countryside”

…Male fawns sometimes grow tiny spikes or buttons of antler…

…within their ears; since the cold had come, antler growth had occurred inside the ear cavity, presumably where there was some warmth away from the hideous driving ice winds. The darkness was more or less constant and had been for many years, the city was swathed in its own filthy dust, a harsh ice, coarse grained formed what may have been a slippery film across the cracked paving stones. There was no one there to slip.

No one knew how the muntjacs had survived and proliferated, moving from relative solitary within the forests to the deserted shopping malls and car parks of the conurbation. The forests were now blackened frozen stumps, stretching for miles away from the city to the reactor which stood dark grey, barely visible on the blackened horizon.

When the deer reached a certain maturity, the antler growth would penetrate through the soft flesh behind the ear and into the skull, ultimately resulting in the untimely death by piercing the brain.

The leaking reactor had done its job, the animals of the forest had one by one succumbed to poisoning and hideous mutation. Artificial selection by toxins; causing the death of all living things, the muntjacs were the last to go.